The parents of autistic children represent a vast and important reservoir of information on the benefits-and adverse effects- of the large variety of drugs and other interventions that have been tried with their children. Since 1967 the Autism Research Institute has been collecting parent ratings of the usefulness of the many interventions tried on their autistic children.

The following data have been collected from the more than 26,000 parents who have completed our questionnaires designed to collect such information. For the purposes of the present table, the parents responses on a six-point scale have been combined into three categories: “made worse” (ratings 1 and 2), “no effect” (ratings 3 and 4), and “made better” (ratings 5 and 6). The “Better:Worse” column gives the number of children who “Got Better” for each one who “Got Worse.”